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Darkroom: A Family Exposure, by Jill Christman
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Darkroom: A Family Exposure is Jill Christman's gripping, funny, and wise account of her first thirty years. Although her story runs the gamut of dramatic life events, including childhood sexual abuse, accidental death, and psychological trauma, Christman's poignant memoir is much more than a litany of horrors; instead, it is an open-eyed, wide-hearted, and good-humored look at a life worth surviving.
Through a shifting narrative of text and photographs, Christman explores the intersection of image and memory and considers the ways photographs force us to rework our original memories. Darkroom is a page-turning and disturbing journey that begins with an older brother's near fatal burning and progresses through a counterculture childhood in which her free-spirited mother moves the family to an isolated mountaintop. The story advances into an adolescence of eating disorders and barely remembered sex, slams into a young adulthood of love, literature, drugs, death, and therapists, and ends soon after a beloved uncle bleeds to death in a federal prison while serving a ten-year sentence for growing marijuana.
Never sentimental, Jill Christman is brutally honest and surprisingly funny. She deftly blends narrative, quoted materials, her uncle's letters, and her father's photography to create a family saga that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating.
- Sales Rank: #1522797 in Books
- Published on: 2011-07-01
- Released on: 2011-07-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .61" w x 5.51" l, .76 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 264 pages
From Publishers Weekly
"I have always been obsessed with photographs. Now I am obsessed with memory," writes Christman, recalling Marguerite Duras's declaration that "[p]hotographs promote forgetting." This Ball State University English professor's account of her first 30 years ruminatively details a counterculture childhood and complicated adulthood, and varies between the harrowing and prosaic. The tale begins with a horrific event before she was even born: Christman's toddler brother was severely burned in the shower while their father was distracted and their mother was at work. Burned over 80% of his body, the boy spent nearly a year in the hospital. The incident precipitated the eventual dissolution of her parents' marriage and consequently impelled Christman's quest to exhume memories. Happy times are rare. Ugly reminiscences surface at age 19, when years of bulimia and self-mutilation propel her into therapy. There, she reveals an ordeal of sexual abuse by a teenaged neighbor. The following year, Christman's 22-year-old fiance is killed in an accident, and her beloved grandmother, keeper of the photo albums in which Christman searches for answers, dies a slow death. Her marijuana-growing uncle, whom she loves dearly, bleeds to death in prison. Throughout, Christman struggles with the concept of how memory shapes the present and reshapes the past. She incorporates into the text elements of her artist parents' work as well as family photographs, and her language ranges from an alternately lush and ethereal literariness to a deliberate grimness illuminated by hope. This book, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, is difficult yet forceful.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Although at times offering shockingly personal revelations, Christman achieves an amazingly balanced perspective in this memoir about her family. In part, this balance is achieved by the clever way in which memory, letters, diary entries, quotations, and photographs are spliced together and juxtaposed to create a richly layered text. Christman (English, Ball State Univ.) also draws extensively on her knowledge of contemporary critical theory. However, her acute awareness of semiotics, of the way in which narratives are constructed, and of how photographs interact with the enigma of memory never compromises the sincerity of the text or overloads it with pretensions. The reader is privileged to be taken on a journey from Christman's childhood to the present, meeting tragedy (both sexual abuse and accidental death) and happiness at every turn of the page. Preconceptions are challenged, experience is analyzed, and painful, socially relevant issues are unflinchingly exposed. The organization of the book into short, almost fragmented passages at once prevents it from becoming overwhelming, and encourages the reader to ponder whether, and how, these many parts can fit into a coherent whole.
Rebecca Bollen, Jersey City, NJ
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Darkroom is a work of art, exquisitely written, spare, never self-indulgent. She pushes the memoir far beyond the usual litany of pain, Prozac and psychiatry to something transcendent and, at times, frighteningly beautiful. . . . Darkroom is raw and honest, a fine debut for a brave writer.
(Diane Roberts Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
How extraordinary: Christman can see so damned clearly in the darkest of rooms. But that's where everything develops, after all, for all of us―in the dark. In the dark, Christman starts feeling her way, stumbling and fumbling and getting knocked down and getting back up, feeling her way towards her own deliberate, tough and oh so sweetly gentle life. Everything is here: pain and love and failure; abuse and terror; shutting up and making up; and even one or two moments of elusive victory―so much shows up here that the whole thing could easily fall into cliché. But that's what really superb writing does: it rescues the ordinary and the everyday, it turns the minute miraculous. Christman has great talent. The book's a joy. Read it, and see how many bits of life come clear.
(Barry Sanders)
Christman employs a kind of collage technique to tell her story. She writes well; her style is sensual and juicy. . . . Darkroom could have been a maudlin read, but it's saved by Christman's insight and skill and leavened by occasional passages of humor.
(Washington Post Book World)
This is an account of remembrance, about memories that cannot be trusted unless they're verified by snapshots from a family scrapbook or verbally by another person. Christman's narrative has a dreamlike quality: it doubles back on itself, jumps from past to present, and flaunts the narrator's unreliability.
(Kirkus Reviews)
It's a beautiful story, beautifully told. . . . Against all odds there is humor here, too, and in the end, the affirmation of a worthy life, won by a survivor.
(Muncie Star Press)
Christman begins her journey into the past by studying family photographs, then searches deeper, exploring memory, where profound truths are discovered. Some of Christman’s memories surface like photos developed in acid; other memories are more gentle. What Christman wants us to know is that all memories, good and bad, remembered or reclaimed, are crucial to self-knowledge. In exquisite and compelling detail, Darkroom exposes Christman’s family photographs in all their complexity and color.
(Sue William Silverman author of Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You)
A survivor's tale full of brutal honesty and intelligence. Like Truman Capote and Alexandra Fuller, Christman offers the reader unforgettable visual images, luminous and terrifying at the same time.
(Julie Schumacher author of The Body Is Water)
Although at times offering shockingly personal revelations, Christman achieves an amazingly balanced perpective in this memoir about her family. In part, this balance is achieved by the clever way in which memory, letters, diary entries, quotations, and photographs are spliced together and juxtaposed to create a richly layered text. . . . The reader is privileged to be taken on a journey from Christman's childhood to the present, meeting tragedy (both sexual abuse and accidental death) and happiness at every turn of the page.
(Library Journal)
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Images and Expectations
By Story Circle Book Reviews
Photographs are permanent images, but our memories fluctuate and transform themselves. What is pictured in photos is often photo-shopped in our minds and hearts. Jill Christman examines the interactions of memories and photos as she looks at her own family photos, stories, and personal memories in her award-winning memoir Darkroom: A Family Exposure. She simultaneously reports her family's story, analyzes it, and comments on how memory might affect it. She insists that photographs, rather than reinforcing our memories, often force us to rework them.
Her family story begins before she was born when her "two-year-old brother's skin left its indelible print on [her] father's palms." Sound bizarre? That's her memory of a family story thirty years after it happened. "The story of Ian's burning changes like a hurt and healing body--written, erased, written over with the thick tissue of scars: coordinating palimpsests of words and flesh. Each time memory ignites, details mutate and emotion shifts: she remembers a phone call, he remembers that the diaper was on, they both remember the scream. Elements are scraped away, scribbled in, retracted, and still some pink shows through." Memories twist, but photos capture a moment in time. They do it without emotional judgment or distortion, but they also do it without the context that memory provides.
Christman tells her family story by comparing actual photos of family members with her personal memories and supplementing her narration with academic research about the ways memory distorts the truth. Her own life is her best illustration of the ways both memories and photos shape self-knowledge.
She examines her counter-culture childhood, her eating disorders, sexual abuse, love, the death of a lover, the death of her Grammy, literature, and the journeys that five therapists took her through as she fought to make sense of her life. She writes of an absentee artist father, an uncle sentenced to ten years in jail for growing marijuana, and a mother who struggled before responding to her daughter's needs. Darkroom is an intense encounter between Christman's cerebral, emotional, and analytical sides. She pieces her complex stories together as skillfully as her Grammy placed photos in a family scrapbook.
Well-written books about any family's dysfunction appeal to me. I'm curious about relationships and how they are perceived, and I enjoy comparing other families to my own.
The interspersed quotes from experts confirm Christman's analysis but occasionally pulled me out of the story. Maybe that was her intention. I couldn't help wondering if those quotes had the same disorienting effect on the reader as Christman experienced when the old photos didn't match her memories. Most of her exquisite language and deep thought kept me riveted, though. She encouraged me see my own life through a new lens.
Alternately humorous, sensitive, intellectual, evocative and eye opening, Darkroom is a written collage that will touch and enlighten readers. No wonder Christman won the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction for this deep, thorough examination of photos and memories. I recommend Darkroom: A Family Exposure to all thinking women.
by B. Lynn Goodwin
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Memoir as art
By Richard Gilbert
I reread this memoir after seven or eight years because my students and I loved three of her essays we studied. Having written my own memoir and read a boatload of memoirs in the meantime, I had developed my taste. I got a lot more out of it the second time because I saw what Jill Christman is doing with memory, trauma, and her distanced, wiser self.
In her telling, the many traumas in her life—including a brother's nearly fatal scalding, her sexual molestation, a fatal car accident, another death, and a lethal imprisonment—are not sensational plot points but, rather, parts of a legacy she lives with and is trying to resolve. Her stance as an inquiring survivor, with effective but sparing dramatization of the past, is key to the high literary quality of Darkroom and to the fact that it's not unbearably harrowing to read.
Photographs and memories, metaphors for each other, and their shifting meanings form the ground of her inquiry. What's interesting ultimately is her survival, her healing, her wisdom, and the literary shaping of her experience—these are this memoir's gifts. This is a memoir to be savored and honored as a work of art.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Simply breath taking
By lydia randolph
I laughed out loud, cried, and was at a lost for words while reading this book. The element that sticks out is the second voice that appears throughout the piece. I encourage everyone who loves to read to read this book. I couldn't put it down once I started. I read it in one day. Job well done Professor Christman!
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